Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper? – Approximately Correct

With peak submission season for machine learning conferences just behind us, many in our community have peer-review on the mind. One especially hot topic is the arXiv preprint service. Computer scientists often post papers to arXiv in advance of formal publication to share their ideas and hasten their impact.

Despite the arXiv’s popularity, many authors are peeved, pricked, piqued, and provoked by requests from reviewers that they cite papers which are only published on the arXiv preprint.

“Do I really have to cite arXiv papers?”, they whine.

“Come on, they’re not even published!,” they exclaim.

The conversation is especially testy owing to the increased use (read misuse) of the arXiv by naifs. The preprint, like the conferences proper is awash in low-quality papers submitted by band-wagoners. Now that the tooling for deep learning has become so strong, it’s especially easy to clone a repo, run it on a new dataset, molest a few hyper-parameters, and start writing up a draft.